Response to JJ's "Lessons"

I believe the story is about a young boy in a foreign country. He is riding a train when an old man sits across from and converses with him. They talk at length about life. The boy seems to think he is in control of his life and it isn’t so bad. The old man on the other hand believes that the boy is only naïve and knows little about life. He tells the boy the life experience comes with age and mocks the boy’s idea that he thinks life isn’t so bad. They are revealed to both be pickpockets at the end but it seems like the boy was the smarter of the two as he remarks that the old man was an “amateur.”
The dialogue throughout the story was pretty good. It rarely felt forced and the use of the Italian dialect here and there helped. Also, the description that were provided for the characters and setting helped paint a clear picture of the train the boy and the old man were riding.
The way thoughts were conveyed in the story was a bit inconsistent. Early on they were put in quotes and then later on they weren’t and the thought just had a tag following it. I would maybe use italics to separate thoughts from the rest of the story and to fix the inconsistency. There were also a couple of stringy sentences here and there that could be condensed or just separated.